Hydraulic control systems are commonly used to control power generation machines, such as turbines. Known hydraulic control systems may include a trip control system or other protection system configured to stop the turbine (i.e., trip the turbine) upon the detection of an abnormal operating condition or other system malfunction. Unfortunately, the failure of one or more components associated with the trip control system to operate properly can prevent a turbine trip operation from occurring during emergency situations, which can lead to extensive damage to the turbine as well as other catastrophes, such as harm or injury to plant personnel.
Existing emergency tripping systems such as, for example, the mechanical emergency tripping system manufactured by General Electric Company (GE), include several components (e.g., valves, governors, blocks, ports, etc.) piped together to form a mechanically operated trip system. In a purely mechanical version, block and bleed functions are performed using non-redundant hydraulically actuated valves. However, in some cases, this system has been retrofit to include electronically controlled redundant bleed valves that perform a bleed operation to dump or remove pressure from a steam valve trip circuit that operates the turbine based on a two-out-of-three voting scheme. Once a bleed operation is performed, however, the GE mechanical tripping system requires that the delivery of hydraulic fluid to the control port of the steam valve be blocked. Such a mechanical system results in a large, complex design having separate parts that may be expensive to manufacture. Additionally, the GE mechanical tripping system requires an operator to manually perform tests of the blocking components. Still further, the mechanical nature of the blocking system of the GE mechanical tripping system requires that an operator travel to the site of the turbine, which is undesirable.
While automatic tripping systems have been developed in which the mechanical governor and associated linkages are replaced with a controller that automatically performs a trip operation, such automatic tripping systems typically include single, isolated valves or are limited to the bleed functionality of the tripping system. In particular, as described above with respect to the retrofit GE turbine system, it is known to use a set of three control valves connected to a controller to perform a two out of three voting scheme for performing a bleed function within a turbine trip control system. In this configuration, each of the control valves operates two DIN valves which are connected to one another in a manner that assures that, if two out of the three control valves are energized, a hydraulic path is created through a set of two of the DIN valves to cause pressure to be bled from the trip port of the steam valve that provides steam to the turbine. The loss of pressure at the trip port of the steam valve closes the steam valve and trips or halts the operation of the turbine. With this configuration, the failure of any one of the control valves will not prevent a trip operation from being performed when desired or required and likewise, will not cause a trip to occur when such a trip is not desired. Additionally, because of the two out of three voting scheme, the individual components of this bleed circuit can be tested while the turbine is in operation without causing a trip to occur.
Unfortunately, the block circuit or block portion of the tripping control system is an important part of the control circuit and, currently, there is no manner of being able to provide redundancy in the block circuit to assure proper operation of the block circuit if one of the components thereof fails, and no manner of electronically testing or operating the block circuit. In fact, currently, the block circuit of this known turbine trip control system must be operated manually, which is difficult to do as it requires an operator to go to and actually manually operate components of the block circuit (generally located near the turbine) after the bleed portion of the trip operation has occurred. Likewise, because of the manually operated components, there is no simple remote manner of testing the operation of the block portion of the trip control system.